Invisible app – XenApp 6

I’ve decided to capture my experiences with Xen products… here’s the first since starting the blog:

I call it, “Invisible app” 😉

This occurs randomly (perhaps 1 in 20) logins when establishing a new session to the farm.

The application launch starts where windows loads the profile in and gets as far as “preparing desktop”. At this stage, the login progress bar disappears and the user is left with nothing. This also occurs with published desktops.

A look at the CDSC shows that the user session is active, however, the application .exe that should be running (eg. word.exe) is not shown as a running process.

IF the user attempts to start the app again, the user is reattached to the invisible app. If the user attempts to start a new app, a new session is started and it appears to work OK.

Update #1:

I have contacted Citrix technical support about this, and captured a CDFtrace for them and Windows full memory dump at the time it occurred.

The Citrix dev analysed the dumps, and found:

“LogonUI seems to be waiting on a APLC call to svchost but we could not see what that thread is doing. ”

so have now asked me to log a call with Microsoft.

Final update:

After much going backwards and forwards I figured out that the problem was caused by failing login script that was conflicting with another script – specifically around mapping drives. The users could not see the command prompt as it’s hidden which confused matters, so the login session just sat there, never starting the app and complaining about a mapped drive.

Simple solution: get rid of the legacy scripts into group policy preferences.